Sender Email address with Apostrophe gives 550 Requested action not taken: mailbox unavailable

This was another fun one because there were no logs on the Exchange server to show it ever saw the message and my spam filtering service was passing the email and saying my Exchange 2010 server was responding with:

550 Requested action not taken: mailbox unavailable (in reply to MAIL FROM command)

The senders email address was like this first.o'last@domain.com which is technically a valid address but I frequently see admins remove the apostrophe to avoid complications.

I finally figured out that yes this error was happening where I suspected on our WatchGuard firewall. For some reason their SMTP proxy disallows this character by default even though it is valid. To fix:

• Open WatchGuard System Manager then Policy Manager. Right click the SMTP-proxy rule then select Modify Policy option.
• lick the View/Edit Proxy button in the right side of Proxy action field.
• (Fix Sender) Mail From of the SMTP-proxy, click Change View button to switch to Advanced View. Click Edit button to edit the Non-allowed characters rule.
• Add the apostrophe at the end of default Regular Expression then click OK.
  Change from [^-_.+=%*/~!&@?0-9a-zA-Z] to [^-_.+=%*/~!&@?0-9a-zA-Z']
• (Fix recipient) Rcpt To of the SMTP-proxy, click Change View button to switch to Advanced View. Click Edit button to edit the Non-allowed characters rule.
• Add the apostrophe at the end of default Regular Expression then click OK.
  Change from [^-_.+=%*/~!&@?0-9a-zA-Z] to [^-_.+=%*/~!&@?0-9a-zA-Z']
• To enable save the config to the device.

Searching returns no results even though you can see files in folder

This one was fairly obscure to find and the cause of the problem probably exists on desktops as well as servers.  I recently had a customer who could search in all of their drives and folders on their server except their main share. From within this folder I would search for *.doc or *.docx files I could see right there in the folder and it would immediately return no results found like it was not even trying to search.

The cause? Someone had removed the SYSTEM account from this branch of folders. The SYSTEM account must have full permissions to files and folders in order to index them.

Once I added the SYSTEM account back on indexing took off and indexed about 60,000 more items and I was able to search for files and get results.

Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2010 upgrade fails with public folder ACL permissions issue

I have seen a few instances now where upgrading from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2010 will give an error of:

Access control list (ACL) inheritance is blocked for the Public Folder tree object (CN=Public Folders,CN=Folder Hierarchies,CN=first administrative group,CN=Administrative Groups,CN=<Your domain>,CN=Microsoft Exchange, CN=Services, CN=Configuration, DC=<your domain>, DC=<your domain suffix>). Re-enable the inheritance and restart setup

The easiest way I have discovered to fix this is through ADSIEdit .

Open ADSIEdit.msc, Select the Configuration partition then drill down the tree through this path

• Service
• Microsoft Exchange
• Your Exchange organization
• Administrative groups
• First Administrative Group 
• Select Folder Hierarchies 

You should now see CN=Public Folders in the right hand pane. Right click and go to properties then the security tab of both the Folder Hierarchies folder and the CN=Public Folders item. In the security tab click the advanced button and make sure"Allow inheritable permissions" is checked for both of them. After this is done retry your install.

OWA showing blank page in Exchange 2010

After certain rollups or patches are applied to Exchange 2010 OWA may start showing a blank page instead of the login page and the URL will look something like https://myexchange.com/owa/auth/logon.aspx?url=https://myexchange.com/owa/&reason=0

To fix this issue open Exchange management console go to your Exchange installation bin folder, typically this is C:\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\V14\Bin and run updatecas.ps1

Cannot add Server 2012 to existing 2003R2 DFS namespace

When trying to add a new server 2012 standard server to our domains DFS namespace which was created on a 2003R2 server (so is a 2000 based DFS) we get the following error

\\domain.local\dfs: The namespace server \\2012SERVER\DFS cannot be added. The server already hosts a namespace. You can host multiple namespaces only on Windows Server 2003, Enterprise Edition or Windows Server 2003, Datacenter Edition.

This was somewhat confusing since the server did not host any other namespaces and I had just added the same namespace to a 2008R2 server a month ago. The resolution ended up being to just go to one of my 2008R2 machines and add it from there and I was then able to manage everything else from the 2003R2 machine.

SharePoint 2013 logging in with wrong user name

There is (as of release) a bug with SharePoint 2013 that will log users into SharePoint using an incorrect account if you map a drive as a user name other than yours through the SharePoint design manager interface. This issue will persist even after disconnecting the mapped drive. It will also continue to be a problem even if you re-enable the log in as another user ability in SharePoint. It will show you are logged in as the correct user but will actually use the mapped credentials. To fix the issue you need to remap the drive with the correct username and password.

SCVMM the domain account specified for the service account could not be verified

Recently when installing system center virtual machine manager I decided to use a domain account for it so I could do HA and got the error "the domain account specified for the service account could not be verified" when trying to click next. I had just created this account while I was installing SCVMM. To fix it I ended up rebooting the machine and logging in as the service account I had created then logging back out and completing the install with my normal admin account. Make sure your service account is an admin on the machine as well though.